TikTok has emerged as a game-changing platform for businesses looking to reach new audiences and drive growth. With over 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok offers a great opportunity to engage younger demographics and build brand awareness.
However, consistently producing high-quality, engaging ad creatives is a serious challenge for most advertisers and affiliate marketers, leading to burnout and plateauing performance. In this article, we'll dive deep into proven strategies to overcome ad creative burnout and scale your TikTok ad campaigns successfully.
Understanding the TikTok creative journey
Before we get into specific tactics, it's important to grasp the overall creative process on TikTok. This process applies to all businesses, no matter their size or industry. The main difference is the resources you have - smaller brands may have to take it step by step, while bigger businesses can move through it more efficiently. There are four main phases in this journey:
- Researching competitors and customers
- Generating ad creatives
- Analyzing reports and insights
- Making continuous improvements
By following this roadmap and sticking to the process, you can unlock the full potential of TikTok advertising and achieve long-term growth.
Phase 1: Competitor and customer research
The first step to nail TikTok advertising is doing thorough research. This phase has two important parts:
Competitor research:
- Take a look at what your competitors are doing with their ads to learn from their successes and find opportunities. You can do this task manually or use TikTok spytools like KaloData to speed up the process.
- After finding ads, use tools like Foreplay's Swipe File to save and organize competitor ads that can inspire you.
- Keep track of how well competitor ads are performing using tools like Spider, so you can figure out what works.
- Study the ads that are doing really well to get insights and come up with new ideas.
Customer research:
- Gather lots of insights from customer reviews, comments, forums, and social media.
- Pay attention to things like their problems, objections, goals, and motivations.
- Use AI tools like ChatGPT to analyze the data and find useful insights on a large scale.
- Sort the insights into categories like what your product offers, its unique benefits, and how people use it. Also, categorize emotional triggers, common misconceptions, and past failed solutions.
By investing enough time and effort into this research phase, you'll discover a treasure trove of valuable insights to guide your ad creative strategy.
Phase 2: Creative thinking and generating ideas
Now that you have a good understanding of your customers and competitors, it's time to turn that knowledge into compelling ads. The key is to connect different ideas in interesting and unexpected ways:
- Combine the benefits of your product with the problems your customers can relate to, so they feel a connection.
- Show how your product's unique features can create exciting moments that make people curious and interested.
- Compare your product to other solutions that didn't work well, and highlight how yours is better.
- Focus on the outcomes your customers desire to address any doubts and paint a picture of success.
While these proven advertising principles are important, standing out on TikTok means going beyond what's obvious. You need to go deeper to stretch your creative thinking and come up with even more amazing ideas:
- Ask thought-provoking questions like "How can we make this hook, visual, or call-to-action even crazier?"
- Brainstorm together and come up with increasingly bold, attention-grabbing, and maybe even a little bit crazy variations.
- Choose the best concepts that have the most potential to grab people's attention and turn them into fully developed ads.
- Be willing to step out of your comfort zone and explore new ideas because that's where the best breakthroughs happen.
By using your own creative thinking and being open to new ideas, you'll come up with ad concepts that are unique and really catch people's attention on TikTok.
Phase 3: Tracking results and learning from them
Once you release your ads on TikTok, it's important to keep a close watch on how they perform and learn from the data. Successful teams like The Essence Vault pay attention to key metrics such as:
- Keep track of the names and links of each ad to organize testing.
- Look at the details of your offers to see how well they resonate and compare different versions.
- Check the click-through rate (CTR) to see how many people were interested and engaged.
- Measure the thumb stop rate to see how well your ads grab people's attention.
- Check the average watch time to see if viewers stick around and find the content engaging.
- Look at the conversion rate to see if your ads are actually leading to desired actions.
Instead of getting overwhelmed by lots of data, focus on the ads that perform the best and the worst. Figure out what elements work well and should be emphasized, and what parts underperform and need improvement or removal.
It's also important to document these insights. Create a central place, like a "learning bank," where you organize the following:
- Keep track of the top-performing ads that you can replicate and scale.
- Look into the underperforming ads to understand what went wrong and how to improve them.
- Take note of successful creative approaches that you should prioritize and expand upon.
- Keep track of promising ideas that need further refinement and iteration.
- Note down the best-performing angles and hooks that you can use in future ads.
Over time, this collection of knowledge becomes really valuable. It helps you make decisions based on data, onboard new team members more easily, and maintain a store of important information.
If an ad doesn't meet your goals, go through a checklist to make improvements:
- Add attention-grabbing text overlays to reinforce your message and keep people interested.
- Adjust the pacing by cutting the video every 1-2 seconds to maintain engagement and momentum.
- Include more variety in visuals by using different scenes, locations, and dynamic transitions.
- Put your call-to-action (CTA) at the beginning to catch people's interest and encourage action.
- Place multiple CTAs throughout the video to give people more chances to respond.
Implement these changes systematically and keep testing. If the performance still isn't where you want it to be, go back to phase 2 and brainstorm new ideas. Remember, failure is just a stepping stone to success, so embrace it as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Phase 4: Keep making continuous improvements and test new ideas
The final piece of the puzzle for success on TikTok is to understand that the creative process is an ongoing journey. Markets change, products evolve, and what was once effective can become outdated. The brands that thrive on TikTok embrace the idea of continuously improving their creative approach as a fundamental part of their business, rather than a one-time task.
Make a commitment to build a "creative-generating machine" that consistently goes through these four phases:
- Stay updated: Continuously gather new insights to understand the changing needs of your customers and trends in the market.
- Brainstorm innovative ideas: Stretch your imagination by coming up with concepts that are even more creative and attention-grabbing.
- Launch and analyze: Release new ads and carefully analyze how they perform to identify the ones that work well and those that don't.
- Learn and iterate: Document what you learn from the analysis and keep refining and scaling your best ideas.
By making this process a regular part of your marketing operations, you'll ensure a steady flow of fresh and engaging ad creative. This will help you make the most of your budget and open up new opportunities for growth.
The secret to overcoming ad creative burnout is all in a mindset shift
Scaling on TikTok requires a willingness to experiment continuously. There are no quick fixes or instant victories. With this mentality you can overcome common challenges like creative burnout and position your brand for long-term success.
First and foremost, understand that ad creative burnout is not a flaw in your ads themselves. Instead, it's a sign that your campaign and ad creatives need attention. By reframing it as "creative blockage," you can focus on clearing the blockage in your creative pipeline by bringing in fresh ideas, trying different approaches, and making improvements.
To get more ideas, let's hear from Zach Murray, the founder of Foreplay.co, a tool that helps you save ads from TikTok and Facebook.
Q: What's an important mindset shift to overcome creative burnout on TikTok?
A: The key is to think of yourself as a creative powerhouse. Our team tests 100-150 new ad ideas every week, treating it as an ongoing process rather than a one-time thing. It's all about continuously gathering insights, generating new ideas, experimenting, learning from the results, and making improvements. This approach is crucial for achieving profitable growth.
Q: How can affiliates consistently come up with fresh ad angles to avoid creative fatigue?
A: One effective way is to use AI tools like ChatGPT to analyze customer reviews and extract valuable insights, such as their pain points, moments of realization, and standout features. Then challenge yourself to find unique ways to connect those insights and come up with even more attention-grabbing and memorable ad concepts. Zach suggests using the "5 levels crazier" framework to push beyond obvious ideas.
Q: What strategies can affiliates use to improve underperforming ads and scale successful ones?
A: If your click-through rate is low, consider adding text overlays, increasing the pacing, using different scenes or locations, and including multiple CTAs. For ads that are engaging but not converting well, you can try increasing your ad spend, targeting lookalike audiences, and creating variations to test different elements like the ad copy, visuals, and CTAs. The speaker aims for benchmarks like a thumb stop rate of over 30% and a click-through rate of over 1%.
Q: How can affiliates and media buyers efficiently manage the large volume of creative testing required for scaling?
A: It's important to develop a streamlined system for generating ideas, launching tests, and extracting insights. Keep a centralized database of your learnings and schedule regular brainstorming sessions to turn those insights into new and fresh angles for your ads. When it makes sense, use creative automation tools to speed up the process. And remember, high-velocity creative testing should be an ongoing practice, not just a one-time effort. The speaker's team has made it an integral part of their growth strategy.
Q: What benchmarks should affiliates aim for to determine if a TikTok ad is performing well?
A: The key metrics to aim for include a thumb stop rate of over 30%, a click-through rate of 0.8-1% or higher, and a completion rate of 8-10% or higher. However, the most important metric to focus on is the click-through rate. If it's low, try adding engaging elements like text overlays, increasing the pacing, using multiple scenes or locations, and including clear calls-to-action throughout the ad. Let these benchmarks guide you in iterating and optimizing your creative process.
Q: How often should affiliates refresh their TikTok ad creative to avoid burnout?
A: Top TikTok advertisers refresh their ad concepts by testing 100-150 new ideas every week. They treat it as an ongoing process rather than a one-time effort. To avoid creative burnout, think of yourself as a creative powerhouse. Continuously gather insights, brainstorm new ideas, test them out, learn from the results, and make improvements. Keep repeating this cycle to keep your ads fresh and effectively scale your TikTok campaigns.
Conclusion
To sum it all, overcoming ad creative burnout while scaling ad campaigns on TikTok requires a strategic approach and a change in mindset. Firstly, it's important to gather insights by researching your competitors and understanding your target audience. This information will help you develop engaging ad content. Secondly, track the performance of your ads and analyze the data to make informed decisions and continually improve your creative efforts. Lastly, adopt a mindset of continuous experimentation and treat creative testing as an ongoing process to avoid burnout and achieve long-term success on TikTok.
To prevent burnout, it's essential to see it as a temporary obstacle that can be overcome by introducing fresh ideas, trying different approaches, and making necessary adjustments. By following a strategic approach that involves research, analysis, and constant experimentation, advertisers can effectively scale their TikTok campaigns while having a number of standby ad creatives to shuffle in whenever ad creative burnout signs start showing.
